Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

We’re not going back!

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

American History and Black History can not be separated.

There’s always a light at the end of the frog.

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

This country desperately needs a functioning Fourth Estate.

with the Kraken taking a plea, the Cheese stands alone.

The new republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

Republicans don’t trust women.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

It’s a new day. Light all those Biden polls of young people on fire and throw away the ashes.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

In after Baud. Damn.

“Joe Biden deserved better than he got from some folks in his own party.”

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

You are here: Home / Archives for Politics / Republican Stupidity

Republican Stupidity

Wait Just A Minute…

by | 37 Comments

This post is in: ,

I am pretty up to speed on the 90’s anti-Clinton talking points, so this came as a little shock:

DEAN BARNETT sends a link to what he says will be his last Foleygate post. In his email, he comments: “I can’t stand it any more. Remember when sex scandals actually involved sex? I miss Clinton!”

Enough to make Barnett miss Clinton? Ah, the pieces are all coming together now . . . .

Now granted, I am no longer in the ‘good’ republican club, but that hasn’t wiped my memory. If you will all think back to the Clinton glory days, the GOP talking point was that the scandal “isn’t about the sex, it is about the lying.”

With all the Republican lying and abuses of power, I guess I can understand why the GOP would want to pretend this was all about sex.

Wait Just A Minute…Post + Comments (37)

The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight

by | 68 Comments

This post is in: 

So it appears Speaker Hastert has decided to do his best Gloria Gaynor impression:

J. Dennis Hastert, who was installed as House speaker eight years ago through backroom maneuvering in a moment of crisis for his party, has no distinct power base in Congress, not much of a national reputation and, in an age of television politics, little polish in front of the camera.

But Mr. Hastert has survived and survived to become the longest-serving Republican speaker. And on Thursday, standing outside his district office in Batavia, Ill., he made it clear that he did not intend to become a casualty of the Mark Foley scandal, saying he expected to win re-election to his seat and run for speaker again when the new Congress convenes in January.

Mr. Hastert made his statement soon after the leaders of the House ethics committee promised a vigorous investigation into the handling of the Foley case, approved dozens of subpoenas and said they expected to finish their work in weeks.

And what of that Ethics committee:

The House ethics committee launched a wide-ranging investigation into Congress’s handling of information about a Florida lawmaker and teenage pages yesterday, as Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) vowed to keep his job, saying, “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

The ethics panel approved nearly four dozen subpoenas for documents and testimony from House members, officers and aides. Its leaders said they plan to complete the inquiry in a matter of weeks, but not necessarily before the Nov. 7 congressional elections.

Sounds like the right thing to do. But then I see Rep. Jack Kingston (R-FL) and Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) on MSBNC’s Hardball (here is the transcript and the gory details), and who they really want to subpoena are Rahm Emmanuel and Nancy Pelosi, so that they can clear their names. Because, you see, in the corrupt party, up is down, down is up, and it is the Democrats who need to clear their names. I don’t thnk I am being too jaded to think that the only reason they agreed to allow the Ethics committee to expedite their investigation into the Foley affair was to attempt to pin this Republican scandal on the Democrats.

This spring, Dick Cheney made it fashionable for high-profile Republicans to shoot (excuse me, the term is “pepper”) people and face no consequences. In an odd twist, House Republicans have decided to follow his lead- only this time, the gang that couldn’t shoot straight is content to aim their rifles at their own heads.

*** Update ***

What did the media and the Democrats know, and when did they know it, LSD (GOP?) edition:

Earlier this week, Rep. Deborah Pryce (R-OH) sent a letter to the clerk of the House requesting a probe into rumors that a drunk Mark Foley was turned away from the House page dormitory.

That part got a lot of attention, and for good reason. But Pryce repeated a second allegation in her letter, something she also heard during a GOP conference call on Oct. 2, that didn’t get much play: Jeff Trandahl, onetime House clerk at the time of much of Foley’s newly-revealed transgressions, had been warned about Foley by the director of the page program.

“[A]nother claim was brought forth that the director of the Republican pages brought specific concerns about then-Congressman Foley’s behavior to the attention of the then-Clerk of the House,” Pryce wrote.

Our attempts to reach Trandahl were unsuccessful, although we learned he has hired a lawyer to represent him. An assistant in his office was unable to tell us his lawyer’s name.

You can read the letter for yourself here. We checked in with Pryce’s office this afternoon; so far they’ve heard no response.

I can’t believe I supported these jackasses.

The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot StraightPost + Comments (68)

The GOP as Fred Garvin

by | 264 Comments

This post is in: ,

I was thinking about who the current GOP reminds me of, and one image kept popping in my head: Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute.


This image was lifted from site listed in the photo

The Republicans advertised themselves as the party that would come in, clean up Washington, and do all those things that we wanted them to do- strengthen the national defense, instill fiscal responsibility, get government out of our lives, reduce the power of the federal government, curtail spending, and so on. I tried to google the list of campaign promises from Bush in 2000 to make sure I wasn’t missing anything, and this is what came back:

It is funny that the above is what was returned, but it isn’t so funny when I think back to Bush’s and the Republican’s promises before we took over all the branches of government, and realize that little good has been accomplished. What have we accomplished in these past few years? What have they done with all our hard-earned money and hours spent advocating for Republican control?

Well- the stock market is at record levels, I guess. Which is great, if you put aside the fact that the market is now just a little bit higher than what it was over half a decade ago. I would suggest private investors might be looking for another broker with this kind of performance.

Taxes are lower, but the deficit has been blown wide open, and we are now expected to graciously celebrate it when the annual deficit is not quite as bad as we predicted it would be. Think about that- imagine you have a kid who was an A or B student, and in a year or two he comes back to you and tells you he thinks he is flunking all of his courses. Then, in a surprise, he manages to get D’s in all his classes. Quite the cause for celebration, isn’t it?

We are more secure, though, aren’t we? In order to keep the security moms voting GOP, we have made terrorism our centerpiece. Now, those same security moms can sleep tight knowing that folks like John Ashcroft can, without their knowledge, examine their email, their phone records, and pry into their private lives without their knowledge, without any oversight. No worries, though. Should we find someting troubling, we can just whisk the secruity mom away for some ‘questioning,’ and if need be, we can waterboard her if she doesn’t give us the answers we like. It isn’t like it is torture or anything.

And the list goes on and on and on and on. Like Fred Garvin, the GOP and Bush have sat on the edge of the bed telling us how good it is going to be, all the while begging us to not pay attention to the ugly prosthetics and hoping we won’t notice the poor performance. And when that fails to keep us distracted, they point to national defense.

So how is our national defense? Afghanistan is slipping into chaos, the military is broken and beaten and worn down and will need years to recover, and our pet project, Iraq, is an unmitigated disaster. In what was ostensibly an attempt to boost the morale of the troops and the country, the Secretary of State made a surprise visit to Iraq.

A surprise, unannounced visit. In a flak jacket.

Because otherwise she would have been killed.

You are doing a heckuva job, Rumsfeld.

But hey- we have a new fence going up- our borders are secure! No more terrorists and illegals flooding over our borders:

No sooner did Congress authorize construction of a 700-mile fence on the U.S.-Mexico border last week than lawmakers rushed to approve separate legislation that ensures it will never be built, at least not as advertised, according to Republican lawmakers and immigration experts.

GOP leaders have singled out the fence as one of the primary accomplishments of the recently completed session. Many lawmakers plan to highlight their $1.2 billion down payment on its construction as they campaign in the weeks before the midterm elections.

But shortly before recessing late Friday, the House and Senate gave the Bush administration leeway to distribute the money to a combination of projects — not just the physical barrier along the southern border. The funds may also be spent on roads, technology and “tactical infrastructure” to support the Department of Homeland Security’s preferred option of a “virtual fence.”

If this surprises you at all, please do the rest of your fellow citizens a favor this election day, and don’t vote. Go watch a movie. Really, the health of this nation requires that you not vote and the rest of us have a chance to undo our past mistakes and vote some people into office that have a clue about leadership, responsibility, honesty, and accountability.

So where does this leave us- well, with Mark Foley and the tattered remains of a disgraced and humiliated House Leadership. The reason the Foley scandal hurts the GOP so much isn’t because Foley himself was a predator and a pervert. Those are a dime a dozen- open a paper anywhere and you can read about some other sick bastard preying on kids. What makes this so special is that it shows how base, how corrupt, how sick, and how dysfunctional the modern GOP is.

The warning signs were there- leadership was told about Foley for years. And they did nothing. They did worse than nothing- they made sure they didn’t even tell the only Democrat on the page board, because this was believed to be a political issue. To these guys, the real damage was not what could happen to the kids Foley was messing with- the real damage would be to their goal of unlimited and unchecked power.

How did these guys who came into Washington with such lofty goals become so corrupt, so incompetent, so evil? A good sign this was happening might have been their crass behavior during the Schiavo affair, when they determined that party politics required them to villainize a private citizen from the floor of the House. An even better sign might have been Tom DeLay’s attempted rigging of the Ethics Committee to make sure that if charged with a crime, he would not have to step aside as majority leader. Maybe it happened when the powers that be decided that the big tent party wasn’t big enough for folks like Andrew Sullivan, but folks like Randall Terry and James Dobson should be calling the shots. Maybe we should have paid attention when we lost Bob Barr, Dick Armey, and Joe Scarborough. The signs were there- some of us chose not to pay attention to them.

Despite how hopelessly incompetent and corrupt and worthless and, let’s face it, dangerous, this administration and this congress are, there are still supporters out there who think the Democrats are worse. For fun, look at the idiotic reactions to the Foley disgrace by the Bush dead-enders:

“The media set us up!”

“What did the Democrats know!”

“Gerry Studds was worse!”

“It was just a prank!”

Blame the media and the evil commie liberals- it’s the same old song and dance, and they will be singing it loudly until the November election. The only problem for this tone deaf lot of party loyalists and hacks is that they don’t recognize that the tune now sounds like a funeral dirge to the rest of us.

In 2000, at the RNC, Bush said the following about Al Gore:

He now leads — he now leads the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but the only thing he has to offer is fear itself.

In a few years, we have codified torture, ruined the military, blown the budget, injected religion into science whenever possible, vilified half the country, legitimized gay-bashing, authorized unprecedented executive powers that will be hard to take back, ruined our international standing, ignored the Geneva conventions, and are well on our way to losing two wars.

Al Gore, as wrong as I think he is on a number of issues, was right that I should be afraid.

The GOP as Fred GarvinPost + Comments (264)

Wiretapping

by | 26 Comments

This post is in: 

Life in Bush’s America:

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we (Brian Ross and Richard Esposito) call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

“It’s time for you to get some new cell phones, quick,” the source told us in an in-person conversation.

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

Think that the government has a FISA warrant for this activity? I have a nice bridge in Alaska for you. So we are looking at unsupervised government wiretapping, also known at the president’s “Terrorist Surveillance Program.”

There seems to be a disconnect here. The name of the program seems to implies that it surveils terrorists. Let’s try to find a connection between the Foley scandal and terrorists…other than the truly insane ramblings of Dennis Hastert there isn’t any. Just a story about a Congressman who couldn’t keep his pants zipped and the House leadership who protected him. So national security is pretty much a dead end.

However this scandal poses an undeniable, clear and present danger to Republican security. Desperate to save their hides, our Republican government would love the power to surveil people like Brian Ross without any oversight body and just maybe find an incriminating bit of knowledge that could change the story overnight. Only inbuilt checks like the FISA court stand in the way of Nixonian abuses on the privacy of ordinary American citizens. In fact that is precisely why FISA was enacted in the first place.

I think you gan guess where this is going. Thanks to the best efforts of truly mindless enablers from John Yoo to power-drunk pundits in DC and online our present administration truly believes that they can surveil whoever they choose without answering to any oversight body whatsoever. Most enablers tell themselves that the president will only use his powers for good because, well, because he’s a good person, and some genuinely don’t care how he will use his powers as long as he uses them for Republicans. Let’s be honest, the first excuse is the most pathetic sort of voluntary blindness and the second is nakedly un-American.

Simple fact: when you add power and subtract oversight and accountability abuse will follow. Humans follow their nature like water flows downhill. Frankly, under the powers claimed by the White House for itself we should have no doubt that every major player in the Foley scandal is under intense and unsupervised government surveillance. As it stands, and bear in mind that this is precisely how the GOP’s remaining followers want it, the only thing standing in the way of that reality is the goodwill of Republican leaders. I’m sure that there exists a person whose goodwill can survive the threat of disgrace, unemployment and prison but that person sure as hell does not work in DC.

***Update***

Yep, 5-month-old quote. That’s what I get for googling around without reading the pub date.

The general point stands – the government claims the right to surveil who it chooses without oversight. In an existential fight for their political survival, who believes taht our leaders will voluntarily limit their surveillance to real terrorists? I doubt that any credible student of human nature thinks that they will do so.

WiretappingPost + Comments (26)

Lord Save Us

by | 39 Comments

This post is in: 

…from the idiots in charge. Via Carpetbagger:

For a guy who’s never had much use for reporters, President Bush sure seems to crave their attention. After he wrapped up a fund-raising event for GOP Rep. Dick Pombo in California, Bush bounded off stage and headed toward the audience to shake hands with supporters. But as he came down the stairs, he paused and shot a disappointed look toward the area where the White House press was corralled. Most of the scribes were buried nose deep in their laptops and didn’t notice the president was on the move. “Hello!” Bush called to them. No response. “Hello, reporters!” he shouted again, leaning in and spreading his arms. Still, nothing. “Hellllo!” Bush bellowed, waving his arms in the air and laughing.

Finally, a Reuters reporter, who had been playing back a tape of Bush’s remarks through her headphones, looked up and noticed the president standing a few feet away. “Oh!” she said, and waved back. Satisfied, The Leader of the Free World went back to the nation’s business.

The president is an emotional infant.

Lord Save UsPost + Comments (39)

Nonsense

by | 23 Comments

This post is in: 

So Dennis Hastert just came out of hibernation to give the most pointless press conference ever. Louis Freeh, who would have made a comically terrible choice for “independent” investigator revising the Page program (say what?), turned it down and Nancy Pelosi would have killed the idea anyway. So all we have now is yesterday’s news, half-formed rumors about even bigger shoes waiting to drop and Dennis Hastert taking back what he said before he even says it. In the midst of all this, Steve Benen suggests the GOP strategy going forward:

Hastert reportedly wants to seize control of this situation and go on the offensive.

Hastert wants to go on the offensive? Against whom? The scandal was started by a leak from a lifelong Republican. Claims that people who knew about Foley’s behavior did not contact the authorities are plainly false.

Maybe Hastert seriously thinks that he can win by inventing a conspiracy of limp-wristed GOP staffers on whom to pin the whole mess. For Hastert’s sake I hope not. Scapegoating Kirk Fordham worked so well for them and Fordham is just one guy. How will they like dozens of burned John Deans leaking what they know to the press? Good staffers keep track of their Reps’ dirty secrets, in order to keep them out of the press. Great ones keep the documentation.

On second thought, Hastert should go for it. Show that velvet mafia who’s boss.

Heckuva job, Denny.

NonsensePost + Comments (23)

Getting It Right

by | 84 Comments

This post is in: , ,

You can say what you want about Michelle Malkin (and many of you never miss a chance to bash her- often, myself included), but she nails it in this post regarding the ‘outing’ of the page who had the IM conversations with Foley:

For the past two days, a conservative blogger has ginned up publicity for his work outing a 21-year-old young man–a former congressional page and current deputy campaign manager for a heartland Republican congressman–who received sexually explicit instant messages from disgraced Florida GOP Rep. Mark Foley when he was 17 and 18 years old. I have received several e-mails from the blogger and readers flogging the post.

I refused to link to the blogger then and even though the Drudge Report has plastered screaming headlines about the blogger’s scoop, I refuse to link to it now. There was absolutely no good reason to expose the former congressional page’s name and identity. Seizing on ABC News’ redaction failure and reporting errors (more on that in a moment) to play gotcha in a feeble attempt to avenge Foley is not a sufficient reason to obliterate the young man’s privacy. The young man was the prey, not the predator.

***

The right thing for the conservative outing mob to have done would have been to halt the gotcha locomotive and make a good-faith effort to ask the young man if he was Brian Ross’s primary source or “accuser.” But nobody gave him a chance to verify that before his name was dragged out into the open.

Michelle is exactly right, and those pushing his name should be ashamed of themselves (especially the creepy cyberstalker who made it his job to track the kid down). Sadly, PJ Media (of which I am a member) and the Instapundit seem to have been major forces (although most of it was Drudge) in helping to make sure this kid’s identity was blown wide open. That isa shame, and they should be embarassed. Someone posted a link to the website in the comments section here, and I immediately deleted it when I saw it. That is the right thing to do, and who this kid is is none of our damned business. He has ben through enough- let him live his life and stay out of his damned business.

Foley, Hastert, the do-nothing leadership- they are all fair game. Leave this kid alone.

Getting It RightPost + Comments (84)